NOTE: Depending on how this scenario resolves, I may come up with a scenario with real-world applications; if so, I will perhaps share the tale of how the scenario was inspired.
Let’s say a legitimate businessman (we’ll call him Bugsy Capone) has been feathering his nest at the expense of his business associates (partners, investors, employees, customers, and suppliers). He’s been succeeding at this by keeping multiple sets of books, which has allowed him to reap ill-gotten gains while surviving inquiries from his victims and their agents. He does not have sufficient mental prowess to keep track of everything without writing it all down, and he keeps his records in a wall safe in his office, along with a nice bankroll for contingencies.
Enter Jimmy Valentine, safe-cracker extraordinaire. Jimmy has caught wind of Bugsy Capone’s cache o’ cash, and decided to convert it to his own use. Accordingly, he surreptitiously enters Bugsy’s office one night, finds the wall safe, and opens it. Acting on the presumption that everything in a wall safe is there for a reason, and that reason is that the items in question have value, he cleans out the wall safe, and takes the multiple sets of books as well as the cash. The cash he secrets in a location where he can gain ready access to it; the books, he brings to his own offices, and puts them in his filing cabinet for later perusal.
Let us now direct our attention to one Dana Ladd, a special agent with the FBI. By an almost implausible set of coincidences, Special Agent Ladd has, among the files in his caseload, separate investigations into the activities of both Jimmy Valentine and Bugsy Capone. He hasn’t been getting far on the Capone investigation, but he recently got a pretty good lead that Valentine took on a contract for industrial espionage on behalf of defense contractor Lockheed-Grumman, who have been consistently underbid lately on defense contracts by their competitor Northrup-Martin (and have gotten pretty tired of it). On the strength of this lead, Ladd has obtained a warrant to search Valentine’s office for evidence of criminal activity, specifically the industrial espionage case. In executing this warrant, Special Agent Ladd takes control of the entire contents of Jimmy’s offices, and his team gets to work doing some perusing of their own. Inevitably, Bugsy Capone’s multiple sets of books are found, and recognized as being relevant to another of Dana’s assignments.
Question: Presuming that incriminating evidence in the industrial espionage case was also uncovered, Jimmy is obviously screwed. Is Bugsy Capone also undone, or is the illicit manner in which his papers found their way into Jimmy’s possession somehow a “fruit of the poisoned tree” issue?
Ancillary question: If no evidence of Jimmy’s participation in the industrial espionage case is found, does this in any way alter the usefulness of the Capone books in that investigation?